NewCircle: Talk & Support

As with anything there are pros and cons. You pay a monthly subscription but then your account is on a point system. Once your points expire you’re required to spend more money purchasing points to continue to talk. The app is supposed to be an app designed to help people who may be going through some of the worst moments of loneliness in their lives and you connect to someone that you then have to spend quite a bit of money in order to stay in contact with them. Calls and video chats are available which are nice, especially to contradict the worries of AI, but they burn through your coins. So I think it’s a good app at its premise, but I think the point value/ratio/cost needs to be rethought by the managers of the app.

I have used this app since around mid December. I was going through a very rough time and I saw an ad for it on Instagram that I found intriguing. I have met some of the sweetest people that I’ve ever met on this app, and I appreciate it for that. However, there are some serious problems with this app. There’s a problem with the pay model, the connectivity, likely the security, and the interface has not been customized to serve the market that it says is served. Connectivity. For the past two weeks, every call that I am on gets disconnected. I hit the paywall quickly because I’m engaging in good conversations with good people. I get no warning before that happens, they just cut me off when I’m out of coins. (More on the paywall later). But, hitting the paywall only happens about half the time. The other half of the time the calls just drop in the middle of a conversation. This morning, when I was talking to someone, it cut off and didn’t even end the call. It kept taking away coins from my account and I was talking to silence. I thought the person was just being a good listener 🤣. I look at my notifications and I have a notification from her eight minutes before that saying I don’t know what happened. I’ve got notifications from every single person that I’ve talked to you for the last three days just like that because of the same situation. The Paywall. The maximum amount of coins as they call it that you can purchase at a time is $24 worth. That gives you 175 coins. The math goes like this, one coin per text message, two coins per minute of audio call, and 3 coins per minute for a video call. If you get into a complex topic that involves sharing more information and regrouping to talk again, you can easily burn through $50 a day, if you want to keep talking to this person. I tried to sign up for a subscription, but that doesn’t seem to work either. Management. I talked to a lot of people on this platform and they seem to be decently paid and happy, which I would hope would be the case for an app offering sincere companionship. A couple of things that I find odd are that there are no timestamps on the text chats. Another thing is that the people who you meet on this platform that are employed by this platform cannot send you photos. A client can send photos, but a companion, as they like to call it, cannot. That’s strange. Another thing that bothers me about this is that none of the people that you talk to know each other. Now, that could be seen as a good thing when you’re dealing with people that have complicated issues and the topics are serious. However, that is the perfect way to keep your workers from ever organizing. I’ve asked all the people that I talk to, if there is any event, online, in person or otherwise, whereby all of the employees are brought together to brainstorm on the organizational model and the outlook. I’ve worked in a lot of different institutions, public and private, and there’s always at least one annual meeting that everyone is required to be a part of. Maybe New circle hasn’t been around that long, but they’re acting more like a San Francisco tech startup than a responsible app to offer badly need a companionship and advice to people are struggling.